Introducing our Accessibility Officer

At Taylor & Francis, we believe it’s our responsibility to champion accessibility. That’s why we’re thrilled to welcome our new Accessibility Officer, Jennie Mather.

A wonderful disability advocate and ally, Jennie joined the company in May last year. She brings a wealth of experience in accessibility, strategy, brand, and inclusive product design to the role. We caught up with her to ask about the work she’s doing at Taylor & Francis.

Can you tell us about your role and how it will enhance accessibility at Taylor & Francis?

As Accessibility Officer, I work in the Operations Team supporting Head of Accessibility Stacy Scott. I’m helping to develop and deliver a business-wide accessibility strategy. This new strategy will ensure all Taylor & Francis products and websites are accessible to everyone. 

My team works closely with others across the business as we strive to improve the accessibility of our eBooks, journals, digital platforms, websites, marketing, and social media to support our customers and colleagues with disabilities. 

Working with the Product & Technology Team, I carry out accessibility audits across our portfolio of digital products, providing reports on accessibility performance and issues that need fixing. This could be a full site audit or looking at a new feature in the test environment before it’s deployed to the live site. These audits and follow-up actions ensure we comply with legislation and offer the best user journey.

What skills and experience are you bringing to this role?

Before joining T&F, I worked at the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) for 28 years. I had a number of roles in different departments, starting as an Education and Employment Administrator and working my way through to Senior Manager for Retail Services; overseeing our retail service provision, product portfolio, and development. Accessibility and customer first, has always been at the heart of what I do.

In 2009, I managed RNIB’s electronic textbook service, which had non-automated administration and production methods. Fast forward to 2011, funded by the Department for Education, RNIB worked with Dyslexia Action to launch Load2Learn, an online database of accessible textbooks and images. I managed the content development and service delivery for this project. In 2016, I worked with Benetech to transform Load2Learn into the RNIB Bookshare UK Education Collection. This improved platform enabled publishers to send their titles via automated feeds, supporting rapid growth of the collection and ensuring learners with a print disability had access to educational materials and opportunities at the same time as their peers.

I love a standard operating procedure, a spreadsheet, and a data insight to drive performance and effective decision-making – all delivered in a way that’s accessible to all, of course!

What is the Accessibility Team working on at the moment?

The European Accessibility Act (EAA) deadline is June 28, 2025. We are ensuring accessibility reporting and auditing across Taylor & Francis’ websites are up-to-date and ready for the EAA. This work also ensures we have up-to-date and regular compliance reviews against Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), and other legislation such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

The priorities for EAA compliance are the three Es – eCommerce, eBooks, and eReaders. We’re using a new tool from Siteimprove which identifies accessibility issues, and have onboarded over 25 sites including Taylor & Francis eBooks, Routledge.com, and Europa World. More sites will be added to Siteimprove throughout 2025. This information is used to write Accessibility Conformance Reports and Statements for each product, as required by the EAA, and to demonstrate our accessibility status to customers. Any necessary changes are fed through to the Product Owner and Development Team for adding to the site’s accessibility roadmap.

My team is also supporting colleagues at T&F to be ready for the implementation of the EAA through knowledge sharing, both about the Act and important accessibility concepts and processes.

More broadly, we ensure the Taylor & Francis Accessibility Statement is updated quarterly, sharing the enhancements made across our products and content, and our commitment to accessible publishing.

We also raise awareness and provide guidance on creating accessible documents across the Microsoft Office suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook) to enhance accessibility for both colleagues and customers. This is feeding into a project looking at making both ancillary materials and our backlist fully accessible.

Do you have a message to share about the importance of accessibility?

Be “born accessible.” Accessibility should never be an afterthought. Deliver products and content that everyone can use right from the start. Remember, it’s easier and more effective to embed accessibility from word go, rather than having to change things later.

There are an estimated 1.3 billion people worldwide who experience significant disability. That’s 16% of the global population, and some have more than one disability.

Many will access digital products using screen readers, magnification software, and keyboard navigation. They may also benefit from plain, easy-to-understand language, clear design with good color contrast, and captioned video content.

Some more key stats:

• Around 1 in 100 children is autistic.
• There are at least 2.2 billion visually impaired people worldwide.
• More than 1.5 billion people have some degree of hearing loss. The World Health Organization predicts that this figure will reach 2.5 billion by 2050.
• Over 2.5 billion people use assistive technology.
• Almost 95% of the top 1 million home pages don’t comply with the World Wide Web Consortium’s accessibility guidelines.

These figures drive home just how important accessibility is, and how much work we still have left to do.

Two easy tips that will make a huge difference:

• When using an acronym, spell it out in full the first time. That way everyone knows what it means and can understand the conversation.
• Always run the Microsoft Office Accessibility Checker before you share a document. This tool lets you know if there are any issues that need fixing.